Exploring the Appalachian Trail, a five-volume series of hiking guides, now fully revised in a second edition and ebook editions (for Stackpole Books).

TEACHING

At Emerson College, in the graduate program in Publishing and Writing, in 2013214, I will am teaching "Book Publishing Overview" and "Book Editing." See QUICK LINKS, under SELECTED WORKS.
On sabbatical, Fall 2014.

Umbrellas at a Beijing bus stop.

TRAVEL

Travel writing and editing assignments have taken me far and wide. Recent business trip: Regensburg, Germany, Sept. 2013, to attend the Common Ground "Conference on the Book." Next up, possibly: Oxford Brookes University International Centre for Publishing (UK), lectures, Fall 2014. Dream trips still to come: Morocco and Patagonia.

WELCOME

On this web site you will find information about my professional life.

-- PUBLISHING WORKSHOPS FOR ACADEMIC AUTHORS and TRADE BOOK WRITERS

-- WRITING AND EDITING

-- BOOK PACKAGING

-- TEACHING

Queries about my work are welcome. However, I am not a publisher or a literary agent. Please do not send book proposals. Participants in my "Publishing Workshops" and others are welcome to inquire about manuscript and book development consultations.

"From Canada, in cursive to die for, mother narrated for me the turbulent weather blowing in from across the twenty-five mile wide lake in front of our house. She told me about grey herons and screech owls and flying squirrels and fire flies that coasted right by her window. So many delicious words, so many exquisitely formed letters. I read, in her steady, always fully legible script, about the long awaited arrival of each summer’s crops of Silver Queen sweet corn and Big Boy tomatoes; about the tradesmen (her charmingly antique term) we had known for decades who stopped by, unscheduled, to fix whatever needed fixing and never gave her a bill. There’s no denying that a certain yearning abides in my heart for one more letter from her, postmarked Lowbanks, Ontario, Canada, because the quality of her handwriting, regardless of the banality of the news she passed on, confirmed in an instant that she still had her wits about her, that the effort required to add a touch of graciousness to life still seemed worth making.

I like to believe that still, somewhere, in that more gracious world, the ascenders rise in a handsome stretch skywards, the descenders dangle playfully like children’s legs off a dock on a warm summer’s day, the roundness of “a’s” and of “q’s” and the sensuous curves of “s’s” and “r’s” and the arresting angularity of “z’s” – that all these scratches on the page still yield something beautiful, personal, and meaningful when strung together with patience and care. The clock moved glacially in Mrs. Goldfus’s classroom in 1953, but not one of us was restive to leave our seats during the long penmanship exercises. Mastering the skill of writing in cursive with a straight pen was tantamount to learning to ride your bicycle with no hands – something every cool kid was determined to do.

Mrs. Roosevelt wrote her column "My Day" six days a week for over a quarter of century, covering everything from politics to child rearing to the arts. Arthur Schlesinger called her "a remarkable woman." Indeed.

A cornucopia of essays, journal entries, poems and more -- all about how America's most famous and oldest long hiking trail, from Georgia to Maine, was conceived and built, and how it is enjoyed by over four million people a year nowadays.